Kiriakou's skeet shooting
=========================

Kiriakou's skeet shooting began as an accident of training. Having worked through pistols in the shooting house, the class moved to the Remington pump-action 12 gauge, a weapon John Kiriakou had never handled, having never fired a rifle or a shotgun in his life.

The instructor was an old southerner near his eightieth birthday with a cheek full of chewing tobacco. "Okay, youngster. So you're the one who ain't never touched a gun before." He asked whether Kiriakou knew why they used the Remington pump action, and gave three reasons: buckshot will kill anyone breaking into your house; they are easy to load, fire and clean; and, racking it, "it makes that bitchin' sound." Kiriakou says he still laughs about it.

The plates

The drill was to knock down steel plates the size of a pie plate. Kiriakou hit both at seven metres, both at twelve, both at twenty-five. Told to try three at a time, he asked how one loads the third; the instructor showed him to hold a cartridge between two fingers of the left hand and feed it as the action opens. He did three, then four, and never missed.

The instructor took him aside after dinner and said it would sound crazy, but he thought Kiriakou could be a competitive skeet shooter. "And that is how I became a competitive skeet shooter. And I was darn good at it." He shot at clubs around Washington and as far away as Warm Springs, Virginia on the West Virginia border, clay pigeons and, as he puts it, all kinds of stuff.

See also

- The shooting house
- The Farm
- John Kiriakou
